Free Forever England by Mike Read Page A

Montmorency. They saw the new year in with a whirligig of skiing, tobogganing and youthful exuberance, before Rupert returned to King’s, a round of Carbonari meetings, political and social debates, and to take up his role of president of the Cambridge Fabians for the year 1909–10.
    On 9 February, he entertained in his own rooms, with Hilaire Belloc as the main guest and speaker. Belloc was a good catch, as he had already written some twenty-eight books stretching back to 1896, and 1909 would see another five published, including his epic
Marie Antoinette
. His books were discussed by King Edward VII; and he was the subject of cartoons in
Punch
. Rupert knew many of Belloc’s poems by heart and certainly some of his songs. The outpourings of the beer-loving Anglophile from La Celle St Cloud in France had far-reaching influences on Brooke’s poems. These lines from Belloc’s ‘West Sussex Drinking Song’ –
    They sell good beer at Hazelmere
    And under Guildford Hill
    At little Cowfold as I’ve been told
    A beggar may drink his fill;
    There is good brew at Amberley too,
    And by the bridge also;
    But the swipes they sell in the Washington Inn
    Is the very best beer I know.
    – with their naming of places in Sussex and Surrey villages, are not dissimilar in their roots to sections of a poem Brooke would write in 1912, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, in which he used place names local to Cambridge.
    Strong men have run for miles and miles,
    When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
    Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
    Rather than send them to St Ives;
    Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
    To hear what happened at Babraham.
    But Grantchester! ah Grantchester!
    There’s peace and holy quiet there…
    As well as Belloc’s words, Brooke was clearly impressed by the exhilarating manner, uproarious humour and powerful gift of speech of this larger-than-life character, who appeared to exist on a diet of beer and cheese.
    The Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes was not so much of an influence. Brooke declared his play
The Frogs,
written around 400 BC, to be a farce after seeing it in Oxford during February 1909, declaring to his mother that it was ‘quite extraordinarily bad’. Notwithstanding his opinion,
The Frogs, The Birds
and
The Wasps,
three of Aristophanes most famous plays, have certainly achieved a certain amount of durability!
    With the spring approaching, Rupert was temporarily without holiday plans. There were thoughts of Wales, Devon, Cornwall, and even Belgium and Holland, when he realised that he could get from London to Rotterdam for just 13 shillings. ‘In April,’ he declared, ‘I shall be God let loose!’
    A Saint
    I left the tomb where pilgrims prayed
    To walk upon the hills apart,
    And in the blackest of the shade,
    I thought of Evil in my heart.
    What were the prayer and praise to me,
    The shrine, and many lights therein?
    One night of all eternity
    I know the lonely truth of sin.
    For I was tired of all the chaunting
    And all the chaunting dreary grew,
    And always I felt something wanting,
    That my perfection never knew.
    So, from the world most far apart,
    In the blind darkness only I,
    I thought of Evil in my heart,
    Alone between the earth and sky.
    There was no light; And no thing stirred.
    I thought, and chuckled. Suddenly
    I crouched in fear, because I heard
    A sound of music near to me;
    A music many players made,
    Of flutes and lutes and of timbrels;
    And I knew that somewhere in the shade,
    God was dancing on His hills.
    And all the night He leapt and trod,
    To the courtly flute and mad timbrels;
    God whirling and pacing, a stately God;
    God’s lonely dance among the hills!

Chapter 4
The Dew-Dabblers
    T HE PLAN OF driving a donkey cart through Holland was forgotten as Rupert discovered Becky Falls, on the edge of Dartmoor. On 25 March, he extolled the virtues of the local topography in a letter to his cousin Erica: ‘My view from the window before me includes a lawn,